ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His fiction and non-fiction has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the 21st Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. A writer of more than 26 books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war. Weston likes to be called a chaotic good paladin and challenges anyone to disagree. After all, no one can really stand a goody two-shoes lawful good character. They can be so annoying. It's so much more fun to be chaotic, even when you're striving to save the world. You can argue with him about this and other things online at Living Dangerously or on Facebook at Badasswriter. All content of this blog is copywrited by Weston Ochse.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Hollywood Titles and Two Act Movies -- Erg!!!

I'm not hard to please. Give me a decent plot, good actors, and a director who knows what he or she is doing and I'll be happy. Like the rest of the universe, I want a three act structure, or modified for seven acts-- either way, think of it as a good beginning, middle, and end. So when Yvonne and I sat down last night to watch two movies, the one I thought was going to be the best left us groaning.

What'd we see? Chronicle and The Grey.

---SPOILERS--

Chronicle was a much better movie than I thought it was going to be. Although even a blind pygmy could tell the abused boy was going to become a supervillian, you sort of rooted for him in a cringing, Carrie sort of way. My only problem with this flick was the title. Did they pick some random word like the Korean kids are doing with T-shirts? Chronicle? Really? For all I knew, it could have been the life and times of Edward R Murrow.

We had the same problem with the revenge-flick Faster, starring The Rock. It says nothing at all about the movie. Personally, I like both of these a lot, but feel that Hollywood messed up in the naming of them. How do they do this? A focus group? A dart board? A talking dog? "Look, Mr. Scott, the dog said Prometheus."

Chronicle? How about Supervillian? It's not like we didn't know what was going to happen by the fifth minute of the movie.

Faster? How about simply Vengeance!  I mean, come on. This isn't rocket science.

Titles not withstanding, at least those movies had an ending. At least they had three acts.

The Grey is nothing more than a frigid Lady in the Water. Neither of them had a third act.

What happened? Did they run out of money? Did the snow machines break? Did the animatronic wolves demand a raise for poor working conditions?

Or did the director, in an artsy snap-your-fingers-in-a-jazz-club moment, say, this is the perfect ending because it represents the universal fight between man and nature. ::snap snap::

Puh-leeese.

Just give us a fucking ending. Don't have the alpha wolf and Liam Neeson face off and then cut to credits. That's such a cop out.

If you wanted to make that comparison, the better ending would have been to have them chased over a rise, only to discover there's a town there, with lights, and vibrance, etc. Then, later, when Liam is having a drink on the porch, reconsidering the value of life, which he learned during the chase, the alpha walks down main street and snatches him off the porch and pulls him back into the wilderness.

That's a much better ending.

Hell? I could think of better endings all day long. In fact, I'm going to power up my animatronic Elvis and we're going to make a list and send it, Care of GOOD FUCKING MOVIES, HOLLYWOOD, CA

Screw a talking dog. I have Elvis!


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